


Within acceptable margin of error

by Yuu_chi



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, cannon information divergent, references to drug dependence, unspecified mental health issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-13
Updated: 2013-08-13
Packaged: 2017-12-23 09:11:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/924561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yuu_chi/pseuds/Yuu_chi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His whole life has been rows of numbers – a steady progression from one number to the next.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Within acceptable margin of error

**Author's Note:**

> So a lot of this completely ignores the character bios and background information on the pacific rim wiki; it contains a lot of references to canon information about their education, but other than that it's fairly free going.

He’s born with a bone that twists and furls like it shouldn’t, that clumps together at his kneecap like its missing important pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that is human biology, wrapping around nerves and blood vessels uncomfortably tight like it’s trying to strangle bone; make it go blue and breathless. It feels like string wrapped tight around his leg – beneath skin and flesh – and Hermann can’t move his leg without crying, doesn’t learn to _stand_ until he’s two because the pain sets him right back down again.

His parents agree that he can’t live like this.

They move from Germany to England chasing a specialist in knee reconstruction surgery.

Hermann has his first operation at four.

Surgeons spend five hours rummaging around in him; untangling lines of red and blue, trying to twist bone into their own design. They scrape at his kneecap, at the unfeasible way it sits disjointed and messy at the top of his tibia, and try to mould it back into something that looks _human_ at the very least.

(They don’t succeed that first time, but it’s… better.)

.

He learns to walk at six; about the same time that has learns advanced algebra.

Hermann has spent long days locked in hospital rooms and bed-ridden for the pain lancing through him, spends his nights devouring book after book, scrawling numbers feverish and thick on paper and walls and bedspreads when the agony stirs bone-deep and numbers explode like visions before his eyes in an effort to just make it _stop_.

He has a lot of time for learning when he doesn’t leave the house aside from trips to the hospital and physical therapists.

.

He makes his first tutor cry when he is eight years old and calls her a ‘mewling quim with no regard for proper mathematics’.  His parents don’t even scold him – because Hermann isn’t a _normal_ child and they don’t even make an effort to treat him like one anymore – just hire a new one; and another one after that when he makes that one cry too.

When he is nine years old his fifth tutor in a year walks out the door. They pack him into his wheelchair, take him to the bookstore – not the vibrantly bright one that Hermann remembers visiting when he was seven, but a _proper_ bookstore with studies on theorems by Leibniz and Euler and other great minds that make his heart race – and tell him to pick whichever books he wants.

Hermann goes home with twelve new books.

Sprawled out beneath the covers with his bad leg levered up on pillows smelling the scent of leather and parchment  with numbers painted in even brushstrokes beneath his fingers, electric beneath his careful touch, Hermann is happy for the first time he can remember.

(When he is considerably older and grumpier, Hermann will sometimes think back on that night, fingers tight around his cane and his eyes squeezed shut, and _remember_.)

.

He has his second operation at ten, and this one goes considerably worse than the first.

He can’t move, can barely _breath_ , without agony tracing up the sharp lines of bone and tender flesh and hurting him so bad he can’t remember anything, can’t count past the eleventh digit of pi, can barely remember his _name_.

He goes back under the knife after three weeks of complete agony.

.

At eleven, he has to reteach himself how to walk.

.

When he is thirteen – two years after the final operation – his parents enrol him in a fancy boarding school in Wales.

He walks with a limp and a cane and has a stash of Vicodin in his blazer pocket and as he watches his parents drive away down a curving dirt road and out sight, Hermann thinks: _I am never going to fit in here_.

But his parents haven’t been able to deal with him since he was a toddler whose mental development outweighed his physical one and still can’t deal with him now that he’s a thirteen year old math genius who is smarter than both of them combined.

Hermann can’t even remember what his mother looked like before the grey took over her hair and the wrinkles ran like rivers down her face. He thinks she must have been pretty once – she looks it in the photos of before he was born, blonde and laughing and clinging to his father, unaware that in a few short years she would give birth to a son who would tear her life to tatters and ruin a still-new marriage to the man she loves.

(Hermann doesn’t know when it was that his parents stopped looking at each other like they mattered, all he knows is now they don’t look at each other at all and his mother’s wedding ring is tucked in a box in the attic full of dusty photographs and love letters that have yellowed with age. His father sleeps in the guest bedroom.)

.

Herman’s life is hell for a year and a half.

The school is private and elitist, but somehow Hermann is still smarter than every single other student enrolled and because he’s never learnt modesty – never had to, locked away in his bedroom all by himself studying night and day –his inability to act cowed infuriates his peers further.

They isolate him, steal his cane when he’s not looking and laugh meanly when he tries to stand only to crumple into a pile on the ground because his leg gives out in a flush of hot pain and agony. Laugh harder still when he has to hoist himself to his feet using a table as leverage and falls over again. The shame that burns up his spine and curls like blooming red along his cheek is a hideous, horrible feeling that reminds him of being five years old with a leg that bent inwards that caused children to stare at the park.

The generous sum of money his parents send monthly that used to go into textbooks and chalk now go into the cleverly named ‘freak fund’ that they say is for his own protection.

Hermann believes them after he tries to stand up to them – there’s a new textbook due out in a month and Hermann needs it like he needs air to breath – and winds up in the nurse’s office with a bloody nose, black eye and broken wrist.

“I tripped,” he says and she takes one look at his bad leg and believes him.

.

Hermann goes to college three years early at fourteen-and-a-half.

He’s a genius and every school in Europe wants their hands on him. He accepts a position in Berlin and is glad to wash his hands of England once and for all.

(It doesn’t even occur to him that ten years of trauma can’t be wiped away like cleaning dust from a chalkboard.)

He moves back to Germany and hears rumours of the youngest student to ever be admitted to MIT having jumped ship from Europe over to America.

Hermann wants to think him a fool but even in Germany the stares follow him wherever he goes and his intelligence intimidates people into silence.

He can see the appeal and, for one frightful week before he decides he really doesn’t care what other people think of him, he considers leaving for America himself.

.

The Kaiju appear when Hermann is twenty-four and Herman throws himself at the Pan Pacific Defence Corps like it was his due.

.

Newton Geiszler is the most infuriating, aggravating scantiest that Hermann has ever had the displeasure of working with – of being assigned _shared_ lab space with. Their first meeting goes something like this:

“Hermann! It’s so good to finally be able to meet you, man. I’ve heard so much about your work, you’re rocking it, dude!”

“That would be Doctor Gottlieb, if you please.”

“Yeah, no, that’s not happening.”

Hermann simply can’t bring himself to get along with the man from that moment on.

.

Hermann watches as Geiszler acquires tattoo after tattoo; strange mixes of blues and red that trace shapes along his forearms and down past the rolled up cuffs of his sleeves. The Kaiju travel with him wherever he goes and Hermann sometimes catches him looking down at them as if he’s seeing them for the first time – like they’re not ink and colour etched into his skin that stay with him forever.

People react to them with a mixture of disgust – disgust at the tattoos, disgust at _Geiszler_ – and avid distrust; and somehow Geiszler’s relegated from the genius Hermann knows him grudgingly to be, to a Kaiju groupie.

It infuriates him to no end because Geiszler might have a morbid fascination with the blasted things, might spend all his days studying reel after reel of footage, prodding at the few samples they’ve been able to procure of the monstrous beings – but Geiszler is a _scientist_ and it’s what he _does._

He’s even more infuriated with Geiszler for putting himself into that position – for _letting_ people treat him like he’s worth less than he is.

(it’s different with them though, and they both know it.)

Geiszler catches him staring one day and gives him a small, self-deprecating smile that is not at all like the brash man that screams back at him in German when they’re arguing and leaves Kaiju entrails in his tea when he wants to make a point.

“They’re a little morbid, I suppose,” Geiszler says, like he honestly believes that was Hermann’s problem with them – that he was so small minded that he thought a few scratches of ink and paint meant Geiszler was aligning himself with the Kaiju, like it made him the _enemy_.

“Don’t think me so simple as the rest of them,” He snaps, tightening his fingers on the handle of his cane because the alternative is going to be throttling Geiszler and he hasn’t yet perfect the Jaegar coding sequence and getting arrested would put a wrench in that plan. “What bothers me is you let people believe that _you_ don’t find them morbid.”

It’s as close to saying _‘for God sakes, stop letting them underestimate you’_ as Herman feels comfortable going.

He turns his back to him and returns to his algorithms and for a moment, he thinks that he feels Geiszler’s staring at him, but when he turns to look he’s gone.

.

The thing is even though they fight like the world is ending – _because it kind of is_ – Hermann finds the idea of sharing his lab with anybody else utterly repulsive.

In the early days of working together he thinks there might have been somebody else in the lab too, but either their Germanic shouting had driven them to seek transfer or they’d accidently killed them lobbing pieces of loose metal back and forth like they really had any intention of hitting each other.

Pentecost asked him once after he’d been sharing a lab with Newton for nearly three years if he might consider moving out to share with the fancy new scientist from Oxford who actually put his things away and didn’t leave biohazard material lying on his desk. Hermann looked at him blankly before asking why on earth he’d want to do that.

Because he and Newton don’t get along – by Gods, does he know that – but they click in a way that doesn’t happen often with him because he’s never had an equal and he’s most certainly never had a friend.

(They’re not friends, not really, but they’re something more than equals.)

And Hermann can work with this; he really can.

.

The Jaegers start failing and the Kaiju keep coming.

It drives Hermann mad – not the least because he was the one who wrote the original coding sequence for them, but also because people around him start quitting left, right and centre. Scientists he’d personally taken under his wing pack up and leave; give up hope and return back to their families like they don’t have a responsibility – like they’re not all that stands between humanity and the end of the world.

It reminds Hermann of being nine and watching all his tutors walk out the door one by one because the pressure was too much to handle.

Eventually, he and Newton are all that remains of K-Science.

Hermann stays because he knows his responsibilities and quite honestly, he’s got nowhere else to go.

He doesn’t ask Newton why he stays and Newton doesn’t tell.

.

Herman doesn’t know when it became Newton instead of Geiszler.

.

The thing is they _don’t_ hate each other.

People forget that they’re the last remnants of the science division, that they spend ten, twelve, _twenty_ odd hour together a day; that they haven’t really been apart since they were first introduced all those years back, that they practically live in each other’s pockets; toss in an approaching apocalypse and a Kaiju lung or two and it’s bound to make them snappish.

Yes, there are times Hermann well and truly hates Newton from the pit of his soul – times when he hasn’t sleep in sixty hours and Newton has Queen blasting through the lab, times when Newton doesn’t wash his hands clean of Kaiju bits before eating and gives himself food poisoning and it’s Hermann that has to rub his back as he hurls over a toilet – but mostly, mostly it’s less about hate than anger and annoyance.

You can’t spend every day of your life for ten years straight with one person and not fight; it’s completely illogical, simply unfeasible.

The rest of the Shatterdome assumes what they will and Hermann never bothers to correct them; he’s not entirely sure how he’d go about explaining the volatile train-wreck that was their working relationship anyway.

(That Newton leaves cups of tea on his desk when Hermann’s leg starts playing up, that some nights he turns the radio down to low and flicks it over to the stations Hermann likes when his equations aren’t adding up and the numbers grate like anger down his spine, that Newton always walks at a pace he can match and leaves him the last chair in a crowded room.)

The more desperate the situation gets – the closer mankind comes to losing – the more they shout at each other in fractured German and storm down the halls of the ‘Dome like one more second in shared space will kill them both.

But they don’t hate each other.

Not really.

(notever)

.

It was a bad day – the worst one yet – and Hermann could barely walk for the complete agony that flared hot and red in the jumbled hulk of his knee.

They’d lost two teams to one Kaiju and the UN had given the announcement that the Jaeger programme was to be decommissioned. It’d been a long time coming, Hermann had seen it rising thick and unpleasant on the horizon, but that didn’t stop the anger and frustration and _humiliation_ from boiling in his blood.

(the way the others looked at him after the announcement; like it was Hermann’s fault that the Jaegers were failing. Hermann almost wished it was. He could take a blip in his coding, a stumble in his maths if it meant that the Kaiju weren’t that much closer to victory.)

He was tired and angry and felt closer to forty than thirty.

(was he still that young? He felt so old these days; like skin stretched tight over too much bone – and that was a feeling Hermann knew all too well, knew it with the intimacy of long nights curled into a ball to lessen the pain that ran like live-wires along his nerves.)

He had medication for this kind of thing; a bottle of Vicodin in his room, cluttered away out of sight. He _knows_ it’s there but somehow he can’t seem to find it. He vaguely remembers putting it some place he wouldn’t search – Hermann always had a dangerous inclination to overtake his recommended dosage, remembered what it was like to realize he was becoming too reliant, to lock it away and shiver through the dull detox that followed – and if Hermann had hidden it from himself, there was less than a 12% chance he’d find it again (he knows, he did the math.)

The pain in his leg isn’t like the groaning ache of most mornings and evenings, not the dull and constant thump of pain he’d grown used to it. It’s the real deal; the grinding of bone against bone that sends sparks flying like embers through him until he literally can’t stand, until his leg gives out mid-search and he falls to the ground like he’s thirteen and the older boys took his cane.

He fists long fingers in the sheets of his bed that he leans against, the cool press of the floor sharp and unpleasant and it takes everything he has not to rip through the bunched up material in his fist. His head thumps backwards, the metallic bite of his bedframe against his neck and the unyieldy press of his standard-issue mattress against his agony-worn head.

Hermann thinks a Kaiju could rise up from the ocean and swallow him and he probably wouldn’t even notice.

He focuses on his breathing – the disgusting gasping sound he makes as the air rips out of his lungs – and tries to remember every trick his therapist ever taught him about dealing with these bouts of agony.

All he can remember was that she was bone-thin and smelt like acid.

His spare hand rubs tight circles against his joints but the way his fingers shake and feel loose and sleep-slackened makes it impossible to put any amount of pressure against the ligaments and nerves. He kind of feels like he’s going to be sick.

Then there’s firm hands batting away his feeble attempts at comfort and rough fingers pushing his trousers up over his knee, working like magic against his flesh and soothing over his bone. Hermann opens his eyes to see Newton kneeling in front of him, tie loose around his throat and hair mussed from sleep.

He was sure he’d shut his door, sure that Newton was sleeping. The idea that he’d been loud enough to rouse him from his first attempts at unconsciousness in seventy-three hours made something curl like shame in the pit of his stomach.

“Don’t,” He rasps out but it’s a weak protest because he’s shaking so hard he can’t feel his toes and Newton’s hands kneading softly against his flesh is like an oasis to the parched man in the desert. Newton doesn’t even pretend to consider his response.

Instead he says: “So I think I’ve figured out how to Drift with a Kaiju,” and Hermann says: “Oh?”

He keeps up talking like that as he works his fingers against Hermann’s bare flesh like it was the most normal thing in existence. He talks about science and Kaiju and Hermann almost forgets that he’s a shaken mess sprawled out beneath the _one person_ he considers his equal – his friend.

(he doesn’t forget the pain though, never that.)

When the fit passes and the splitting pain gives way to a tightness beneath his skin and a weakness in his muscles that make it impossible to stand, Newton slings one of Hermann’s arms around his shoulders still chatting away at a mile an hour – he does this when he’s tired or when he’s forgotten to take his meds; but his eyes are sleep-rimmed and Hermann trusts him enough in this moment not to care which it is – and helps Hermann into bed.

He falls asleep the second his head feels the feather-soft brush of his pillow; tired and sore and Newton’s babbling words carry him off away from this place of agony.

He wakes the next morning to Newton passed clean out beside him, Hermann’s arm trapped beneath his shoulder blade. Hermann realizes he must have fallen asleep immediately after he himself did, too tired to even make the walk back to his room.

Hermann tries to pull his arm free – there’s an unpleasant twinge in his shoulder that sends a sensitive ripple like a wave down his arm – but Newton makes a small snuffling sound and Hermann stills immediately.

Looking down at him with his hair a-mess and glasses askew, Herman realizes something.

.

The next day he does the math. He does it six times over on the small hand-held chalkboard he keeps tucked in his room.

Numbers don’t lie like emotions do.

There is a 96.07% chance that he is in love with Newton.

Hermann lets out a shaky breath and scrubs the chalkboard viciously, watching as numbers and mathematic improbabilities blur into shaken white lines that smudge like dust.

He promises himself he will never tell.

.

Pentecost starts recruiting every Jaeger pilot that’s hasn’t yet died and the Shatterdome becomes cluttered with activity as the efforts to refit the Jaegers into something that won’t shatter at the rift consumes every waking minute.

When they salvage Gipsey Danger Hermann can’t help but to sneak in close and run his hand along the battered metal and cool steel beneath his fingers. She’s the last of the Mark-3 class and Hermann had always been unfairly attached to them; it’s the first time he got the coding sequence perfect; she’s the first time he got something _right_.

He tightens fingers on his cane and closes his eyes. If Gipsey can be salvaged from the water-logged wreck of rust and torn steel that she’d been, surely other impossible feats can yet be accomplished?

(they could win against the Kaiju, close the rift and stop everything around them from withering and dying. He and Newton could discover how to fix this, could save the day – the world – and then –.)

And then what? They save the world and what happens? Newton goes back to teaching at MIT? Hermann accepts a position at Oxford or Harvard who are sure to be chasing after him in the event he cancels the end of the world?

He pulls his hand back and feels the slime of oil and grease on the palm of his hand; sticky and disgusting like blood that glues his fingers together. He pulls out a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes a smudge of black against the crisp white and watches it bleed through the thick fabric.

Yes, Newton would go back to America and show the world his brilliance and Hermann would go back to England or Berlin and write math theorems and eventually win a Fields Medal or the Nobel Prize for physics. They’d go to opposite ends of the earth and never see each other again; except for maybe the anniversary of when they once saved the world.

And maybe separate time zones and living in different countries entirely would fix whatever was broken in Hermann’s brain and he could look at Newton and not _want_.

(maybe, but not bloody likely.)

Hermann lets out a shaken breath and folds his handkerchief back into his pocket in a neat square. He looks up at Gipsy – welding sparks flying on the catwalks above him, the loud grinding of metal and machines. She’s a weapon built for war and she’ll have no place in this world once that’s done.

Hermann thinks of chalk and blackboards and equations. He thinks of what he knows of Kaiju’s weaknesses and how he can calculate the exact moment a monster will rise from the ocean.

He breathes deeply and walks away from the Jaeger bay and Gipsy; he wonders if they’re not that different after all.

.

They come up with a plan to close the rift and Hermann’s fingers tremble as they pull holographic projections this way and that to demonstrate to Raleigh just how it will be done. Newton snipes at him in the background – elbow deep in Kaiju guts – and Hermann snaps back because that’s what they _do_ and it eases the tightness in his stomach and stills the shakes in his fingers.

They’re so close to ending this and all Hermann can think about is how the left side of the lab will look when it’s over and Newton leaves.

(it’s ridiculous even by his standards; there is so much more at stake here, so much greater things than he and Newton and their discombobulated mess of a relationship that Hermann shouldn’t be as afraid of losing as he is.)

And then Newton proposes Drifting with the disembodied husk of a Kaiju brain and something in Hermann’s mind must be broken because he could swear Newton once told him the exact same thing while his fingers undid knots of pain in his knee.

 _By Gods Newton_ , He realizes; _you’re serious_.

He fights viciously against it – it’s crazy, it’ll _destroy_ him; and Hermann not too proud to admit he feels a little like he’s choking on air – and eventually Pentecost rules it too dangerous and straight out orders Newton not too attempt it.

Hermann’s not stupid enough to think this would really stop him if Newton was determined; but without access to Drift equipment they’re stuck at an impasse.

Hermann breathes easy.

Three hours later and he realizes he should have known better.

.

Finding Newton shivering and seizing on the floor with blood running down his face and his eye red-ringed reminds Hermann of being ten and being told you’ll never walk properly so long as you live – it’s that version of having the rug pulled out from under you and Hermann is floundering to keep from panic.

When he has Newton propped up in a chair with a glass of water and Pentecost pressing for information, Hermann realizes just how angry he is, because the fear is still pumping thick through his veins, because he almost lost this infuriating man to a machine made of garbage at the brink of the end of the world; it’s enough to make him want to laugh at the mess that has become his life.

He doesn’t though; he just snaps at him and argues until they’re just shouting at each other and fighting about the wrong thing entirely until Pentecost roars for them to shut up.

Herman does and folds his fingers tightly together against the smooth wood of his cane and promises himself that so long as he’s here, he’ll never let him do something so monumentally stupid ever again.

.

Hermann doesn’t even think about when he sees Newton preparing for the second Drift.

Well, he does, but he doesn’t think about stupid, inconsequential things like privacy or how he might die, how Newton might see every thought he’d ever kept secret in their time together. He doesn’t think about being six, eight, ten – he doesn’t even think about the percentage 96.07 – he just looks at Newton and thinks about how he’s sheet-pale and covered in blue slime, how his hands are shaking as he cobble together impossible machinery from trash, about how this stupid, ridiculous man that he’s a little in love with is about to _do it all over again_ and he just can’t; he _won’t_.

“Together,” he says and pretends not to notice the way Newton’s throat bobs and his eyes widen like Hermann had just given him the world on a silver platter.

“Okay,” he breathes after a moment. “Okay.”

They’ve been together for ten years now and seeing Newton go it alone isn’t anything he ever wants to see again.

He puts the make-shift helmet on, takes a deep breath.

Newton’s voice counts down to one and out of the corner of his eye Hermann sees him push the button.

.

Drifting is like nothing Hermann has ever experienced.

His whole life has been rows of numbers – a steady progression from one number to the next – but Drifting is another thing entirely. Nothing seems to happen in the right order; he goes forwards and backwards and directions he hadn’t previously thought had even existed. It’s its own dimension and Hermann is so far out of it he can’t even feel the itch to study it.

 _He’s seven years old and watching numbers spill across the whiteboard beneath bone-thin fingers, telling his teacher why she’s wrong wrong_ wrong _– he’s eight years old and his tutor is crying because she keeps trying to teach him things he already knows and his patience has snapped – he’s ten and sitting in the corner of the hospital waiting room with strawberries-and-cream on his tongue, watching as the nurse – he’s eleven and reteaching himself to walk, teaching his leg to support his weight, biting his lip until he bleeds because he can work out square roots in his head, but he can’t even walk without – thirteen and curled up in a corner in the middle of a panic attack; he can’t, he just can’t, can’t can’t can’t can’t –_

It’s impossible to tell which memories are his and which memories are Newton’s; they all blur together in fuzzy shapes and feelings and Hermann can smell the fumes of whiteboard markers even though he’s never used one a day in his life.

_He’s twenty-five and just meeting Hermann and the electric thrill that chases down his spine nearly – and Newton is the most infuriating, frustrating individual he has ever met, and he never wants to let go of this feeling, never wants to back to – alone, he’s no longer alone; he has an equal, because Hermann won’t leave him, Hermann doesn’t mind if he talks a mile an hour and forgets to breathe, Hermann, Hermann, Hermann – Newton’s fingers on his leg, shifting the aching joints and stilling the pain like it was simple, like he didn’t even realize how much agony he’d saved Hermann from; didn’t realize exactly how deep that saving ran and – together, together, together; or not at all –_

And then the Hive mind roars to life and the shock of it; the impulse to kill, to devour and destroy, sends Hermann reeling out of the Drift with images of destruction and demise.

He can hear Newton calling his name and taste blood – he’d bitten his tongue during the near-seizure that followed the Drift – and he knows he’s speaking, that words are stuttering out of his mouth, but he so desperately needs to be sick that he barely registers them.

When he finishes heaving out his guts –because part of his mind is still humming with the need to destroy and the whiplash from going from the Drift back to reality leaves his mind flailing – Newton is waiting silently for him with a handkerchief like he knew he would be.

They don’t look at each other as they harass somebody into taking them back to the Shatterdome post-haste; partly because they’re on a timeline for preventing the destruction of the world here and partly because they both already know whatever they would say.

.

It’s the 25th of January 2025, Herman is thirty-five years old and they’ve finally won. The clocks in the Shatterdome read a row of twelve zeros and he can barely hear himself think above the noise of victory.

(he doesn’t quiet anyone, doesn’t even really _want_ to; they’ve earned this; after twelve years of war; _they have earned this_.)

It’s not all celebration –Hermann saw Herc Hansen heading back to his quarters a few moments earlier with his head bent low and a hand over his face – but nobody’s pretending it is. This is a celebration and a wake for all those lost at once.

He’s sitting in the lab with the door propped open with a stack of books so the barest noises of the victory drift in, but mostly he just needs a moment away from it all while he learns to breathe again.

The Drift is over, but the thoughts and images that had gone vaulting through his mind remain. He knows everything there is to know about Newton now; he knows the name of his medication and his dosage, knows the sharp pain in his flesh and the soft hum of machinery as Kaiju appear on his skin; he knows little things like these, small, insurmountable.

But there are other things, things he’s not entirely certain are the usual side-effect of Drifting. Maybe it’s because they Drifted with a machine made from garbage at the word’s end; maybe it’s because for the sparest hint of a minute they shared brain space with an entire alien race. He doesn’t know – not yet, but he will, he’ll write a dozen different theorems and construct a thesis and put everything down on paper; just not yet.

And he knows – oh god, he _knows_.

It’s not a very scientific exploration of what Hermann is trying to express, but he can’t think of a better one. He just knows. He knows Newton’s mind like it’s his own; knows every thought, glimmer and flicker to pass through it. Knows that Newton thinks even faster than he talks and some days – the days where he’s even more irritating than usual – are the days when his brains is rocketing so fast he can’t get any ideas out at all.

Most of all though he simple knows it’s okay.

Because if Hermann did math until he came up with 96.07%, Newton just shrugged and thought ‘ _it’s a definite sure thing_ ’.

The door creaks loudly behind him and Hermann turns slightly on his stool to see Newton carelessly kicking aside the books Hermann had used to keep the door from shutting – Newton probably wouldn’t have been so careless if he’d known those were his books Hermann had used, but he’ll wait for him to discover that himself – and steps into the lab.

The door closes with a click behind him.

They’re silent for a minute and Hermann stares back into an eye rimmed with red to match his own and thinks; _oh_.

Something must show on his face or else the connection between them still hasn’t dissipated because Newton just looks at him and smiles.

(it’s not a very nice smile; there’s the barest glint of teeth and a tired downward curl to his lips, but Hermann thinks it’s exactly the kind of smile he wants right now.)

Newton takes eight-and-a-half steps forward and sets his hands on Hermann’s shoulders before swinging his legs up to straddle his lap. He avoids his knee almost unconsciously and Hermann knows he’s not the only one who saw things in the Drift.

“Hey,” Newton says as he leans his forehead down against Hermann’s own and the contact – skin on skin, Newton’s hands curving around his shoulders to rest against the nape of his neck – soothes something inside him that had been aching since the Drift.

He’s not sure he’s ever really going to be able to be apart from Newton again and he’s not nearly as bothered about that as he should be.

“You’re insufferable,” he says instead and Newton laughs – a soft huff of warm air against his lips – and leans forward to kiss him.

.

Following the decommissioning of the Shatterdome both he and Newton were inundated with offers and letters from very nearly every university in the world. They talk about it at length – Hermann mostly wants to return to Berlin but Newton is eager to travel everywhere and anywhere and watch as the world brings itself back together – and eventually agree to a series of guest lectures spanning across both Europe and America.

It doesn’t even occur to them to go separate ways and do separate things; following the Drift they get fidgety and restless if separated for too long.

What Hermann had first thought were side-effects of the Drifting process turn out to be something of a permanent link between their brains. Raleigh had looked uneasy when Newton had tried explaining the handshake to him and they’d gotten the impression theirs hadn’t been the typical Drift sequence – not that it wasn’t already screwed halfway to hell by being a three way Drift with the remnants of an alien brain, but it seems they’d underestimated just how much so.

It’s not exactly like the Drift – not nearly so overwhelming and consuming – but the link between them is something like a constant thrum of _there_. Newton’s wedged solidly at the back of his brain and Hermann can feel him always.

(some days there’s a ghostly sliver of ice-cold hunger that whispers like danger beneath Newton’s solid presence, and Hermann doesn’t even have to ask Newton to know what _that_ is.)

The link – if that’s what this is – isn’t always clear though, doesn’t come with a translation guide, but mostly though, mostly they manage it okay.

.

The first time they have sex is very nearly a disaster.

It’d been fine – more than fine; fingers warm against cool skin, breath mixing and lips wet – until Newton had begun undoing the buckle of his trousers and Hermann had just panicked.

It was an infuriating conditioned response which he knew he didn’t have control over, but the thought of Newt seeing his leg – the strange twist of his kneecap that was uneven and rough, the gliding scars of surgeries past that curled blistering-pink along his skin – sent a sharp jolt of fear lancing through the thick fog of arousal.

It was ridiculous. Newton had seen his leg before, had touched it even, and had never expressed anything beyond professional curiosity about it. For God sakes, the man found Kaiju innards to be the most fascinating thing in existence; Hermann’s leg wasn’t going to be a bloody issue.

But his fingers latched onto Newton’s wrist and his body froze and everything in his mind was just a jumbled mess of confusion and _want_ and ‘ _please don’t find me disgusting’_.

Hermann had been burned too often in the past to learn to be anything but extremely careful about whom he invited into his bed.

(and his heart. And his mind, as this case would so have it.)

Newton though just paused; looking down at Hermann with careful and considering eyes in the near-gloom of the room. Something in his expression made Hermann realize just how much of those flickering thoughts of insecurity had made it through their link.

Before he could say anything – what would he even say? Newton knew exactly what this was – Newton’s fingers tightened around his belt and he leaned forward to kiss him. It was a slow kiss – no technique, completely messy – but it was a kiss meant for distraction as Newton’s fingers slide open his belt and trailed silk-smooth downwards as he tugged Hermann’s trousers lower and lower until the ruined wreck that on another person might have been a leg was visible.

One more kiss – and Hermann’s mind was infuriatingly clouded – and he sank downwards until Hermann’s fingers could just barely ghost through his hair. He realized what Newton was going to do only a second before he did.

Lips pressed lightly against the terrifying scar that stretched like a burn over his knee – wet and cool against his skin – and Hermann couldn’t help but make a small noise a bit like an animal dying that he wasn’t proud of in the least. He could feel Newton’s smile against his leg as he trailed his lips along the scars and the misshapen lines of bone where tissue had been removed. He kept it up – a steady heat of lips and tongue on the only place Hermann had ever really ben afraid of – until Hermann dragged him up to kiss properly and Newton just laughed against his mouth like Hermann had given him the punch line to a particularly brilliant joke.

(Hermann managed to get him to stop laughing eventually with fingers and tongues and Newton panting against his throat with legs tight around his waist as he came.)

.

They got to Berlin first and then America and fight like they always have because apparently saving the world and being mind-married still can’t break them of that.

Hermann’s leg still plays up and he spends nights curled up on the floor with only Newton’s careful hands gliding soft over skin and voice low in his ear to keep him grounded – a hushed murmuring in his mind, and Hermann can see the way that Newton’s own leg is stiff with the ghost of Hermann’s pain that flickers through the link – and some days Newton’s brain just doesn’t stop and he goes eighty-odd hours without sleep and breaks the mirror in the hotel bathroom because his reflection had bothered him and they _both_ have nightmares – blurs of memories and thoughts hazing together in sleep until they wake up as one, sweat-slick and gasping for air and simply lay still until morning.

Mostly though? Mostly though, Hermann knows they’ll be okay.

(Hermann does the math. They’ll never be perfect – they never were – but the numbers say they’ll pull through.)

 .

On the first anniversary of the beginning of the world, Newton gives Hermann a card that says 96.07%.

And he doesn’t need Hermann to tell him he knows it’s the only time his math had been about 3.93% away from correct.

(Hermann burns it on the stove and they wind up going to Moscow for a conference which is a much better anniversary present anyway.)

.

Hermann is thirty-six years old and wakes up each morning to a light snoring on the left of the bed.

When he was younger – somewhere before his parents fell out of love – he used to think love meant a set of matching rings that you wore forever.

When Newton rolls over and blinks awake and smiles out a ‘ _good morning, you massive creeper, oh my god, have you been watching me sleep?’_ and Hermann looks into an eye with a red ring bright and always that matches his own, he can’t help but think that his definition couldn’t have been that wrong after all.

 


End file.
